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Fighter jet farce leaves Liberals in awkward spot

You'd think, given the volume of chatter in the House of Commons over the past decade, that RCAF pilots -- one of whom died Monday, tragically, in a training accident in Cold Lake, Alta. -- would be flying X-wing fighters out of Star Wars by now, and not a ragtag fleet of 1980s-vintage refurbs that were new when many members of the current Parliament were children.

The Liberal government has pledged redress with a sole-source purchase of 18 Boeing Super Hornets -- the updated version of Canada's CF-18. So grievous is the "capability gap," of the Royal Canadian Air Force, we're told, there's no time for competitive bids. That's for later, perhaps as many as five years hence when, with due deference to best practices and Treasury Board guidelines, the actual next RCAF fighter will be chosen.

Lockheed Martin's F-35 Lightning II fighter-bomber will be among the competitors at this pageant, gainsaying the Liberals' 2015 election pledge to nix the vaunted "fifth generation" stealth fighter entirely. But never mind: Five years from now is another term, another cabinet, maybe another government.

Politically, it is all quite clever. First, the RCAF really does badly need new fighters. In an increasingly uncertain geopolitical climate, the opposition Conservatives are in no position to argue forcefully against any purchase that makes the Canadian military more capable. Second is the aerospace contracts, tied to Canada's continuing membership in the F-35 consortium.

Those contracts, held by more than 30 Canadian companies that contribute to Lockheed-Martin's supply chain, are worth more than $600 million. Any final decision to ditch the F-35 would put them at risk -- particularly now, we have to assume, with a protectionist U.S. Congress and a protectionist U.S. president on the ascendant. Kicking this can further down the road keeps Lockheed in the game.

Political cleverness aside, this is dishonest -- on several fronts.

First, the "capability gap." It emerged this week that the cabinet, not the RCAF, had arbitrarily changed the definition of how many planes it needed in order to fulfil its basic mandate of protecting Canadian air space and meeting NATO commitments.

This makes sense when you consider the 77 functioning CF-18s are up for another refurb, price tag about $500 million, that will keep them flying until 2025. There may indeed be a looming emergency that requires Canada to have 95 working fighters (77 plus 18) heading into the next decade. If so, what emergency? And at what budgetary cost?

Had the Conservatives dared to quietly grow the RCAF fighter fleet by 23 per cent, at a cost of $65 million to $70 million per plane, the Liberals would have called them warmongers and spendthrifts. To be sure, the Liberals may be embarrassed by the very mention of the CF-18 -- having made such a to-do about withdrawing them last spring from the war against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. Having beaten swords into ploughshares, they're now buying more swords. How awkward.

More disingenuous still is the claim that a proper, open fighter competition is impossible in short order. The five possible selections are the F-35, Boeing's Super Hornet, the Eurofighter Typhoon, Saab's Grippen, and Dassault's Rafale. Given an abridged new statement of requirements, a competition could have been run and a new fighter selected in 2017, sources tell me.

Follow the Liberal strategy to its conclusion and you end up with this: A mixed fleet, comprising some CF-18s, 18 newish Super Hornets, and years hence, long after the punters have forgotten Campaign 2015, the F-35 -- by which time it, too, will likely be obsolete.